


The Island

by scotchplaid



Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-22
Updated: 2015-02-22
Packaged: 2018-03-14 15:09:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3415358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scotchplaid/pseuds/scotchplaid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>B&W AU. Just a short spin on a "shipwrecked on an uninhabited island" fantasy. Not that the experience is all that fantastical for the group. . . .</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_Three Weeks_

It was hot, but then it was always hot. It would get hotter yet, and then the others would return to the shelters to sleep or, if not sleep, then sit or lie in the shade until the angle of the sun was lower. But she wouldn’t allow herself the luxury, there was too much to do. There were snares to check, and water to lug back from the spring, and, though the others thought it futile, a trip to the highest point on the island where she would flash distress signals into the sky. She carried a small mirror in her pocket, and she would hold it up, directing its reflection toward the faint exhaust trails of planes that had passed overhead. She would repeat the code for SOS over and over until her arms grew tired. The sunlight would be hot on her arms, her head, her face, but she had gotten sunburned so many times the first few days that the burns had eventually darkened and deepened. She would just freckle -- more.

Squatting, she peered at the first of the snares, putting the bucket she was carrying to her side. There weren’t many animals on the island, which was a mixed blessing, she supposed. They didn’t have to worry about predators, but on the other hand, there wasn’t much in the way of prey. The most common animal was a small, weasel-like looking thing. They had learned or, rather, Helena had learned to bait the trap with pieces of fruit, bananas or mangoes, and Helena had been the one who had made the snares, cutting lengths of vine and knotting them into nooses that would slip over the . . . weaseling . . . a leg, its neck, and hold it, suspended, over the fruit it had never had a chance to eat. Of course, whoever checked the snare would have to kill the weaseling since, even if the noose had slipped over the animal’s neck, the noose wouldn’t have drawn tight enough, but she had grown used to doing that. She had grown used to doing a lot of things she had never imagined doing.

No weaseling yet. She stood up, peering into the darkness of the undergrowth. There were more snares set deeper in the jungle; the weaselings didn’t often venture outside it. The farthest they would go was the fringe of young trees and bushes that marked the transition of the island’s grasslands to jungle. Helena had been the one to learn that, too. It was the smell of a fire that had given Helena away, that had introduced Myka to the weaselings. Myka had found her, sitting next to a small burning cone of wood and grass, picking at an even smaller carcass spitted on a piece of wood. The meat had smelled oily and musky, but Myka had discovered that she was salivating. She had crouched next to Helena.

"You can’t do this,” she said. “You can’t sneak off and eat food that you’re not willing to share.”

Helena had looked at her flatly. Then she turned her attention back to the meat, pulling at it, swearing softly as it burned her fingers. “I catch it, I get to eat it. I don’t see anyone else here trying to catch one of these disgusting little creatures.”

“If we operated on that logic, Steve and Pete would get to eat all the fish, and Claudia and I all the fruit. We share what we gather.”

“Since you’re here. . . do you want any?” Helena offered her the spit of wood, and Myka was tempted to yank it from her and bite into that burned chunk of island rodent -- whatever it was. But she bit down hard, instead, on her bottom lip and waited for the painful twisting of her stomach to stop.

“Of course, I do, but I’m not going to keep this secret between us. I’m going to tell the others that you’re trapping whatever these things are.” Myka gestured at the carcass. “So when you come back down to the beach, you better be carrying one or two, or you’ll find that there won’t be any fish or crabs for you.”

“But there will always be a banana or a papaya, right? Claudia might let me starve but not you.” Helena was smiling, but her tone was contemptuous. “You worry too much about everyone else.”

Myka flushed, but she didn’t look away. “I’m not worried about me. The others like me, they’ll look out for me.” Helena tipped her head back and dropped a long, stringy piece of meat into her mouth. It looked gristly and smelled worse, but Myka’s stomach was growling, loudly. “No one likes you, Helena, including me. Ever wonder why I’m the only one who finds you when you’ve gone off for hours on end? Because I’m the only one looking. You might want to remember that.”

When Helena had returned to the beach at twilight, she carried four dead weaselings on a vine. She didn’t offer to skin them or clean them, she merely dropped them in the sand in front of Artie and then walked away toward the ridge of rocks, which extended beyond the bay into the ocean. They were large and smooth, worn down over millions of years by water and wind, and Myka and the others used the ones closest to the beach to dry their precious few items of clothing. Helena would frequently sit on the ones at the end of the ridge, gazing out over the ocean. She would be battered by the surf as she sat on the rocks, but she didn’t seem to care. Myka wondered if she realized that if she were to fall off the rocks or a wave were to sweep her off that she would be carried out too far for even Pete, the strongest swimmer among them, to reach her. But maybe Helena didn’t care about that either.

Shaking her head to bring herself back to the present, Myka started pushing herself through the bushes and vines to check the other snares. For a few seconds, she walked nearly blind as her eyes adjusted from the sunlight to the darkness. The constant chittering of insects and birds stopped as they heard her approach and then resumed once they identified that she wasn’t a threat. She had to keep an eye out for snakes and there was one particular leafy. . . thing, she wasn’t sure whether it was a bush or a tree or a flower, because it had tiny white flowers tucked deep between its leaves, that burned her skin every time she brushed against it, but otherwise she felt safe being in the jungle, this jungle, anyway. There were other rainforests on the island, but they took longer to get to, so she wasn’t as familiar with them. Helena and Steve had explored them, Helena because she had a naturalist’s bent, or so she said, and Steve because he was always looking for a new place to meditate.

It wasn’t that Myka never wondered about what she saw, for instance, she wanted to know the name of the plant with the white flowers that would leave the stinging welts on her skin, but there was never time enough to examine a leaf or a bird’s nest, let alone meditate. When she finished sending up her SOSs and brought the dead weaselings and water back to their camp, she would go sit with Artie in the men’s shelter. Half the time he wouldn’t even acknowledge her presence, but sometimes he would talk to her, never calling her by name since that would be admitting that he knew she was there and that she knew he was lonely and wanted to talk to someone. He spent too much time by himself, like Helena, but for entirely different reasons, Myka suspected. When he talked, it was usually a lament, either about how it was all his fault that they had ended up on this island or about how his wife, Vanessa, would be left to shoulder the burden of their debts.

“She runs a clinic back home.” Back home being the island, one of the American protectorates in the Pacific, that the tour boat had departed from the day of the storm. “Provides care to anyone who walks in the door, whether or not they have insurance, whether or not they can pay. She gets donations and the occasional grant, but sometimes there isn’t any money.” He rubbed his face with his hands. “God knows I wasn’t bringing much money in. No one wants to see paradise on my little tub, but what I brought in, I gave to her. Now she won’t even have that.” He rolled back on his pallet, one of three in the shelter, which was no more than a crudely constructed shanty made from hacked lengths of bamboo, vines, and leaves. She, Claudia, and Helena slept in an identical one a few feet away.

Myka addressed the worry she felt she could speak to. “Artie, it wasn’t your fault that the storm blew up like that. There hadn’t been any warnings.” Tour boats wouldn’t leave the harbor, or they would curtail their tours if storm warnings had been issued. There hadn’t been any issued before they got on Artie’s boat, and the sky had been a blue so clear and deep that it had seemed an ocean in itself.

“But Pete knew,” Artie grunted. “When he gets his hunches, he’s almost always right. He said we shouldn’t go out, but I was too desperate to listen. Ever since MacPherson started up his tour business, I can’t get anybody. Can’t blame ‘em, who wouldn’t want to be on a shiny new boat with wait staff offering champagne and cheese plates?” His eyes slewed toward Myka, and one corner of his mouth drew up in a sour smile. “I saw you counting through your money. If you’d had enough to afford one of his tours, you’d have been on that boat.” As Myka blushed, he said gruffly. “That’s all right. What I can’t figure out is why the princess got on my boat. Hell, she could have bought one of MacPherson’s boats.” He sighed, lacing his fingers on his generously rounded abdomen. Everyone had lost weight on the island except Artie. “She’s said she’s going to sue me if we ever get off this rock. I don’t doubt that she will.” 

Now that they were into their third week on the island, and it seemed less likely that they would be found anytime soon, Artie was less worried about Helena’s threat to sue him. His concerns centered more on Vanessa, whether she was working too long and too often at the clinic so she wouldn’t have time to worry about him. To take his mind off his fears for his wife, Myka tried to get him to talk about happier times, when they had first met, when he had known he was in love with her. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes he turned on his side and said he was tired. It was always a toss-up, which Artie she’d see. Yesterday had been one of his turn-his-face-to-the wall-days, maybe today he would talk to her. 

Myka rose from checking the last of the snares. No weaselings. That was odd, but maybe Helena or Steve had been here before her. On this side of the rainforest, there was the spring. So far they hadn’t located another one, at least not any close to where they were camped. She would stop on her way back and fill her bucket. It wasn’t a large spring, and she was terrified that they were going to drain it dry somehow. If that ever happened, they were going to be dependent on rainfall, and though it rained every day on the island, trying to collect enough water for the six of them to drink. . . . She shook her head again. Just like there were things she could do that she had never imagined doing before, there were things she resolutely refused to think about. 

Like not getting rescued and living out her days on this island. She grimly marched through the grass, not being as careful as she should because there could be snakes here as well. Just yesterday Steve had nearly been bitten by one on his way back from meditating. Snakes were the worst, worse than the sand mites that bit them at night, worse than the bats that she would startle on her way to the latrine. Worse than the latrine, which was a shallow ditch they all worked to dig in the hard-packed earth. It was just inside a small grove of trees, far enough away that they couldn’t smell it at camp but not so far away that getting to it was an issue. She could feel the scratches on her legs stinging from her sweat. The grass was long and thick and some of it had serrated edges; she wasn’t sure her skin would ever become tough enough to withstand the grass, she wasn’t sure she wanted her skin to become tough enough. 

The high point of the island was relatively close to the end of the island where they were camped, a couple of miles away at most. From its top, she could see the rest of the island, longer than it was wide, narrowing like an arrowhead as it disappeared into the ocean. There were no other islands in sight, no ships against the horizon, no evidence that any human had been here before or would be again. Except for the vapor trails. High, distinct from cirrus clouds only in that they were straight, like tracks. She had never seen a plane, and she knew the fact that there were vapor trails didn’t mean that the planes flew near them -- the island might actually be miles upon miles away from the trails. It was also unlikely that so far up the reflections from her mirror could even be seen. But she wouldn’t think about that, she told herself as she dropped the bucket, and took the mirror from the pair of old board shorts that Steve had given her to wear. She held it up to the sun and began to signal, three short flashes followed by three longer flashes and ending with three more short flashes. 

When she returned to the camp with her full bucket, she wedged it into the sand next to the other two buckets under a palm tree. Pete came out of the men’s shelter and picked up one of the wooden spears that he and Steve used for fishing. Catching sight of her, he waved and danced across the hot sand toward her. Of the six of them, he was the one who never wore shoes. Probably that had something to do with the fact that he had lost one when he had been helping them into the life raft, but as they shared food and the scarce toiletries that they had managed to save, they shared shoes. But everyone’s shoes were too narrow for Pete’s very wide feet. 

“Wanna come fishing with me?” He didn’t wait for a response, hopping back for another spear. Sighing she followed him down to the water’s edge and slipped off her sandals. She had been looking forward to the shade of the men’s shelter, even if Artie pretended that she wasn’t there, but she also wanted to make time for Pete. While he made her laugh with his bad jokes and was the only one of them who hadn’t descended into self-pity at one time or another since they had washed up on the island, she sensed something fragile about his optimism. Although she had never been quite able to capture it, she thought she saw a woundedness in his eyes, even in the midst of his joking and clowning. But this afternoon, he seemed completely at ease, teasing her, as he often did, about her “Girl Scout sense of duty.” Laughing, and he always seemed to be laughing, he said, “We’re on a freakin’ tropical island, Mykes, you need to kick back some.” 

He had nicknames for everyone. She was Mykes, Claudia was Claude, Steve was Buddha, Artie was Skipper, and Helena was Princess. The only nickname that had caught on with the others was Princess. “You do know that we’re the only ones on this island, right? There’s no resort the next hill over. There’s no bunker where there are supplies from the 1970s, like in _Lost_. We’re on our own.” 

“But you don’t even take a siesta, man. And you come back all red-faced. I keep thinking you’re going to have heat stroke out there. And if you kicked the bucket, who would bear my children?” 

“Mmm, your next best bet would probably be Helena.” Myka took a spear from him. They were out about waist-high, and though the waves were relatively gentle, they were still strong enough to rock her as she dug her toes into the sand. 

“I’m not sure that very important parts of me would survive the encounter,” Pete said, scanning the water. It was so clear that they could see to the bottom. “What’s that urban legend thing about women’s, you know, having teeth? Hers would be fangs.” 

“It’s not an urban legend, Pete. It’s folklore.” But in all fairness to Pete, Myka asked herself, what were urban legends but contemporary folklore? And it was true that Helena was barely civil to him. Trying to imagine Helena being pleasant to him, let alone seductive, would take more effort than she was willing to expend. “On second thought, your ‘you know’ wouldn’t even get close enough to Helena’s ‘you know’ for you to find out.” 

He shivered. “If the princess and I end up the last two on this island, we’re going to stay the last two on this island.” He jabbed at a shadow that seemed to ripple between them, and Myka jumped hastily out of the way, nearly falling backward into the water. He grabbed her hand to steady her. “Damn, missed it. You’ve gotta take care of yourself, Mykes. You’re my only hope.” He grinned, and she had to admit that he was attractive, raffishly attractive with his dark hair curling down his neck and his beard (so far he was keeping it trimmed with a pair of scissors). He was the only one of them who hadn’t burned, his skin turning not red but the color of the coconuts that grew so tantalizingly out of reach. She could admire that he was well built, acknowledge that she had always had a fondness for a piratical look, concede without hesitation that he was one of the most good-natured people she had ever met, and yet know without the slightest doubt that she had no interest in him. Not as more than a friend, anyway. Perhaps it was still too soon after Sam’s betrayal. Maybe a few years on the island would change her mind, if it came to that. She devoutly hoped that it wouldn’t. 

He held a finger to his lips and pointed to another shadow edging closer. Myka thought she saw a tail flip and then Pete was driving his spear through the water and bringing it up, a fish wriggling on its end. “Dinner,” he said with satisfaction. 

Ultimately they ended up with three fish, Myka spearing one of them. They brought them back to the beach, cleaned them, and then, because there was no storing them, they cooked them. There was always a fire going in the camp, and there were wide, flat stones they used as cooking stones nestled among its coals. The others were emerging from the shelters, not because they sensed that Myka and Pete had returned with food but because they all were always hungry, and any movement in the camp raised the hope that food might be associated with it. Claudia took a couple of leaves from a pile they kept for the purpose, and Myka wrapped the fish in them and put them on the stones. 

It didn’t take long for the fish to cook, and Myka cut the fish into equal portions. That and some bananas and sections of a strange citrus fruit that tasted like a cross between an orange and a lemon was their dinner. Their meals didn’t vary much. If Steve and Pete went fishing in the morning, they would have fish and fruit for breakfast, too. There wasn’t much conversation, the focus was on eating. As Myka shoveled the fish into her mouth, feeling it burn the tips of her fingers and seeing the others gobble the food down just as quickly and messily, she recognized there wasn’t much in the way of table manners either. 

Dinner over in a dismayingly short amount of time, they sat silently for a few minutes, and then Steve and Claudia rose, saying they were going to collect wood and more fruit for tomorrow. Helena pushed herself up and started walking toward the rocks, and Pete rubbed his stomach and announced that he was going to lie down. Artie stared morosely into the fire. The light already seemed thinner and weaker, though the sun was still above the horizon. Once the sun started slipping below it, day would quickly turn into night, and there would be little to do then but sleep. Myka took some driftwood from their small store and fed it into the fire. Then she cupped some sand in her hand and sprinkled it on the cooking stones; using some leaves and a scrap of cloth, she tried to clean them of the fish without burning herself in the process. 

“We’re never going to make it off this island,” Artie said suddenly. 

“What makes you say that?” Myka scooped more sand onto one of the stones. 

“We’ve been here three weeks. How long are they going to keep searching? Let’s face it, except for our families, no one’s invested in our return. Oh, there’s probably more interest in the princess, but her phone’s at the bottom of the ocean. There’s nothing we have, except that damn mirror of yours, that can send out a signal. No phones, no computers, no GPS, no radar, nothing.” He flipped a leaf into the fire and watched it burn. “We’re stuck.” 

“I’m not ready to give up, and neither is Pete. If you’re not willing to believe me, then believe him. You say to trust his hunches, and he believes we’re going to be rescued.” Actually Pete had said only that he wasn’t ready to believe that they would never be rescued, which wasn’t the same thing. But Artie didn’t need to know that. 

Artie shrugged, but he didn’t say anything more, which, since he rarely said anything positive, meant that he wasn’t saying anything negative. Small victories, Myka, she counseled herself. He remained at the fire as she went into the water and swam out a short distance and submerged herself several times. It was something she did every morning and every evening. Not a bath so much as a rinse-off, but with no soap and precious little shampoo and just a few safety razors, it was all she would allow herself on a daily basis. Shaving and washing her hair were weekly treats, and they probably wouldn’t last that much longer.

She saw Helena sitting on the rocks, but she made no attempt to swim over to her. Helena treated her with a little more civility than she did Pete, but the fact that she didn’t snarl when she said “Good morning” or “Thank you” could hardly be interpreted as friendly overtures. Which was just as well, since Myka would have felt honor-bound to respond to them, and she honestly didn’t like Helena. It seemed silly to say it, but Myka didn’t like her because Helena wasn’t nice. There was another reason Myka didn’t like her, but she wasn’t ready to examine it more closely. Not nice was reason enough. If Helena didn’t air her threats about suing Artie in front of the rest of them, she didn’t hide her contempt, claiming multiple times that if she had known that “that scabrous little boat was about as seaworthy as a cardboard box” she wouldn’t have gotten on it. And when Pete would snarl back that no one had forced her to get on it, she would glare at him and then stride off somewhere, sulking for hours until Myka would feel compelled to find her, just to reassure herself that Helena wasn’t hurt or lost. While she would help when asked or was browbeat into doing so, she almost never volunteered. And then there was the whole business with her and the weaselings. The only time Helena was really bearable was at night, when she was asleep. 

Myka hadn’t recognized who Helena Wells was until Claudia had told her. They had been collecting fruit one morning, not long after they had arrived on the island, and Myka had said the words, in reference to Helena, “Who does she think she is?" 

“Helena frakkin’ Wells.” As Myka had looked at her blankly, Claudia said slowly, “Do you not know who she is?” in the way that people did if they thought you didn’t speak the language. And maybe Myka didn’t, because she didn’t read the gossip columns or the entertainment news or the kind of potboilers Helena Wells wrote, and she hadn’t watched the few movies Helena had been in before she decided she’d try her hand at writing, and she didn’t flip through the style magazines that Helena had modeled for when she had been no older than Claudia. “She’s been making news lately because of the scandal with” and here Claudia had dropped her voice although Helena was nowhere near them -- in fact, she was back at the camp having declined to help them gather fruit, which was what had occasioned Myka’s frustrated “Who does she think she is?” in the first place. A scandal involving a famous director Myka also hadn’t recognized and the director’s equally famous wife, another actress. “She was sleeping with him, and his wife is so peeved she releases all these letters and e-mails Helena had sent her, and then he’s mad because he realizes Helena’s been getting it on with his wife as well. It’s been everywhere, you can’t get away from it. Although since you’re completely clueless, that can’t be quite true. No wonder she ran to that resort on --” Claudia didn’t say the name of the island they had all been on, she just jerked her thumb over her shoulder in its general direction. No one said the name of _that_ island anymore, it had a sort of sacred quality to it, as if to mention it might invoke lightning from the sky or maybe another storm that would sweep them all away again. “She was being hounded. The director hated her, the actress hated her, and the world was eating it up. I’m sure she just wanted to go somewhere no one would know her or, if they did, they wouldn’t care.” 

“So we’re sharing a shelter with a celebrity?” Myka had mused. “I wonder if she knows she grinds her teeth when she sleeps.” 

“Probably because she thinks she has Artie’s balls between them.” Claudia had grinned wickedly at her. 

Looking at Helena now, leaning on her arms, her legs stretched out in front of her, Myka grudgingly conceded that she still looked pretty good, even after three weeks of no soap, no make-up, and no change of clothes. She still wore the capris she had worn on Artie’s boat, but she had exchanged the short-sleeved sweater she had worn for a turquoise sports bra Claudia had given her. She wasn’t much taller than Claudia and about as slim, but her breasts were definitely bigger, and the sports bra, despite its spandex, was challenged. She had even acquired a light tan once the last layer of sunburn had faded, and she made for an arresting visual, the tanned skin, the dark hair, the turquoise bra. Myka wondered why she bothered to notice, but, considering how little there was on the island to distract her from basic survival, perhaps there was no need to wonder at all. 

She and Claudia had long since retired to their shelter by the time Helena crept in. Claudia always dropped off to sleep, but sometimes Myka didn’t, even though she was usually exhausted by the time night fell. She liked it when all three of them were in the shelter at night, that way she didn’t have to worry about where the other two were. Usually if one of them was missing it was Helena, still gazing out at the ocean or wandering the island, although that was as careless a thing to do at night as to sit out on the rocks when the tide came in. The shelter was small and their pallets, consisting of little more than branches covered by jagged pieces of the life raft and equally jagged strips of the few blankets Pete had tossed into the life raft with them, were, of necessity, placed close to each other. Helena’s knee knocked against Myka’s leg as she brushed against her crawling onto her pallet, not an uncommon occurrence, as Myka’s pallet was between Claudia’s and Helena’s, though Myka suspected the bumping wasn’t always an accident. It was as if, even in the smallest things, Helena wanted to make sure that her misery in being on the island was known -- and shared. 

But she couldn’t let her dislike of the woman get the better of her, that would be disastrous, so Myka said softly and as pleasantly as she could, “Goodnight, Helena.” 

She could hear the surprise in Helena’s voice as she responded, “Goodnight, Myka.”


	2. Chapter 2

_Eight Weeks_  

Myka had added keeping track of what day it was to her tasks. Steve had had a watch that showed the date, but when he had fallen from a coconut palm trying to cut some coconuts down, the watch face had been smashed. Steve had been somewhat smashed, too, and Myka was ashamed to admit, even to herself, that her first two thoughts had been selfish ones. If Steve was dead or badly injured, they would lose their most adept fisherman. He was quicker to see fish than Pete and more sure in his aim. If Steve was only badly injured, he was someone they would have to care for, someone they would have to feed, and he would be able to contribute nothing in return. They had all been in the camp when he decided that this would be the morning he would climb the palm. It wasn’t as tall as the others, and it even bent down at the top. Looking at the banana he had just peeled, he threw it into the fire, and he slogged through the sand toward the tree. He had kicked off his deck shoes and clapped his hands, talking to himself encouragingly. With a last loud clap, he started climbing the tree. Claudia had been at the base of it, encouraging him until something, a misplaced foot, a sweaty hand, an insect that he might have unthinkingly batted at, caused him to swing away from the trunk and fall. She began to scream and she kept screaming as they ran toward Steve, Artie no less urgently but behind the rest of them. Helena roughly shoved Myka toward Claudia saying, “Keep her quiet, you’re good at that sort of thing.” 

Myka had tried to hold the shaking Claudia back, smoothing her hair and telling her that Helena and Pete would take care of Steve. After a few minutes, Helena and Pete had raised Steve to a sitting position, and he dazedly looked around him as Helena examined his head and Pete asked him to move his arms and legs. Thankfully he hadn’t broken any bones, but there was a large lump on his head, and Helena worried that he might have a concussion. They watched him carefully over the next couple of days, but other than having a bad headache, which they couldn’t do much for other than to give him a couple of aspirin from a travel bottle that Helena had taken from her purse (that now served as a carryall when Claudia and Myka gathered fruit) he seemed to be fine. 

Steve’s fall from the palm tree had happened on a Thursday, five weeks after they had landed on the land. The next day Myka scratched into the trunk of a tree she had designated for the purpose, the number 36. Once Steve had recovered, their normal patterns resumed, gathering fruit, collecting water, spearing fish, setting snares for weaselings. And a few new chores had been added as well. There were small bays and beaches up and down the island, and Pete had discovered that turtles would nest in the sand to lay their eggs, so they sometimes gathered eggs as well, although Claudia refused to eat them, saying she wasn’t going to contribute to the worldwide predation of turtles. Helena had discovered a new mammal to hunt, a raccoon, or what looked like one, although it was much bigger than a raccoon. The raccoons had raided their snares several times, leaving only scraps of weaselings behind. They were slow-moving, which meant that it was possible to run them down and kill them with spears or clubs. But you had to be swift and aggressive in the killing of them because a wounded island raccoon was a dangerous thing to move in on; it had pronounced jaws with very sharp teeth. Helena, not surprisingly, was good at killing them.

But in another sense their lives hadn’t returned to normal. Myka kept remembering how white Steve’s face had looked after he had fallen, how still he had been, and she found it sad that they knew so little about each other when there were so many dangers on the island. One of them could be carried off at any time by a snake bite, a strong wave, a sudden illness. She knew that Steve liked to meditate, and she suspected that he was gay, from the jokes that he and Claudia would sometimes share, but other than that, she knew nothing. She didn’t even know how he and Claudia knew each other. One afternoon as she came down from flashing distress signals, her arms aching, she saw him cut across the base of the hill toward the jungle, and she hurried to intercept him. 

“Steve, wait up,” she called. He paused, a faded sport shirt hanging unbuttoned, swim trunks triple-tied around his hips. They were his own, only he and Pete and Claudia had actually carried spare clothing when they had had to desert Artie’s boat for the life raft, but they were too big for him now. 

He smiled as she came up to him, the blue eyes and white-blond of his hair, bleached by the sun, startling against the darkness of his skin. “You’ve got another chore for me?” 

She shook her head as they both automatically turned toward the spring. “Just want to know how you’re doing.” As he was about to deflect her inquiry with a shrug of his shoulders, she put a hand on his arm. With him, she was instinctively comfortable being direct. “I’m realizing that we’ve been here almost two months, and I know next to nothing about most of you. What did you used to do? How did you meet Claudia? It may seem silly to be asking about this kind of stuff now, but we may be here for awhile.” 

“I was. . . am a software developer, and I had a start-up in Silicon Valley, where else?” He said with a self-deprecating grin. The grin faded, and he turned away from her to tug at a piece of grass. He put it between his teeth. “Some stuff happened. . . my sister passed away, my boyfriend and I split up, and I just needed a break. So I sold the company, bought some camping gear, and decided I’d hike the globe, see if I couldn’t find a little inner peace.” 

“I’m sorry about your sister,” Myka said and, feeling that her swinging of her bucket was inappropriate -- it lent a jauntiness to their conversation that felt out-of-kilter now -- she held it still. “The two of you were close?” 

He nodded. “Yeah. When she was diagnosed with cancer, it about destroyed me. That’s how I met Claudia, she and I were in a support group. Her brother had died of leukemia. I told her that I was going to take some time off, see the world, and she wanted to tag along. That day we got on Artie’s boat, we had been gone for six months, and we had decided it was time to go home. We were going to head for the airport as soon as the tour was over, that’s why we were carting around our backpacks.” He lifted his eyebrows at Myka. “Ironic, isn’t it? The day we were going to call it quits and put away the backpacks for good. . . .” His voice trailed off. 

“All the spare clothing came in handy, otherwise Helena and I would be running around naked.”

Steve laughed. “Not sure she would have minded that.” At Myka’s frown, he said, “She’s not so bad once you get past that prickly exterior of hers.” They knelt down at the lip of the spring, and Myka submerged her bucket. Once it was full, he took it from her, ignoring her protests. “She and I, we sort of share a point of view.” 

“Because you’re gay and she . . . .” Myka lifted and dropped her shoulders. “She doesn’t take gender into account?” 

He laughed again. “God, no. Believe me, sexuality, sex period, is the last thing on our minds. Well, on my mind, I can only speak for myself.” He followed Myka into the fringes of the rainforest, looking up at the tree canopy as she bent to check a weaseling snare. There had been a weaseling, but one of the island raccoons had gotten to it first. “We share a science background. We were both at MIT.” 

Myka’s surprise was evident even in the dimness of the forest. “It’s true, but she dropped out a credit or two shy of graduation. Hollywood came calling or something like that.” 

“Seems like she opened up to you.” Myka had meant it only as an observation, but it had come out as a resentful grumble. She didn’t like the woman, she reminded herself, so why was she annoyed that Helena had chosen Steve to confide in. It wasn’t as though her saying “Goodnight” of an evening was going to work wonders on Helena. 

“Not really.” Steve brushed aside some vines, and Myka carefully skirted the plant with the tiny white flowers. “She asked me to teach her some meditation techniques, thought it might help keep her from going crazy. But she’s pretty intense. . . .” He hesitated. “What about you? What brought Myka Bering to Artie’s boat on that fateful day?” 

“Like you, I had a relationship that ended, and I wanted to get away.” Ended wasn’t quite the word. Shattered, maybe exploded. She and Sam had been engaged for four months, living together for two, and she had come home early on an afternoon when he had said he would be out on client calls all day. It had happened just like it did in the movies. She had heard noises from their bedroom and had opened the door, and Sam and Karla, one of the junior attorneys from the personal injury division of the firm, had drawn up the sheet to their chins. She wasn’t sure who had been the more stunned. Karla had flown from the bed, bundling her dress and shoes into her arms, and run out of their townhome, while Sam had repeated in the same patient, slightly condescending tone he would use with clients, because he always knew more, knew better, of course, “Let me explain, Myka. Just hear me out.” She had had to hear him out because she hadn’t been able to move, not really. She had collapsed on the foot of their bed and listened, because she couldn’t bring herself to do anything else. 

It had been a flirtation that had gotten out of hand. It wasn’t anything serious, he still loved her, he said, he still wanted to marry her. As she continued to say nothing, he had conceded, yes, it was a mistake, but they could work through it. He had known better than to try and touch her, sit near her, but he circled her as he dressed, the patient, condescending voice eventually growing more impatient, but no less condescending. He loved her, but he found her lack of ambition, her indecisiveness about what she wanted to do with her life frustrating. She was working as a paralegal when she could do so much more. He had worked his ass off to get through law school and paid his dues putting in 15-hour days billing clients that the senior partners had fobbed off on him. Well, he was a partner now, and he had a client list of his own, and he wanted a wife who was as accomplished and confident. 

He had put his shirt and socks on and was trying to step into his pants. As he jerked a pant leg up, the panel of his briefs gaped open, and she could see his proudest accomplishment, pink and limply curled, and she wondered briefly, coolly what Karla had thought of it, if she had enjoyed it more. He had seen where her eyes had dropped, and he had reddened, roughly zippering up his pants. He hadn’t ever cheated on her before, he said vehemently, and he wouldn’t ever again. Not until he found her wanting again, Myka thought cynically. He checked his watch; he said he wanted to talk it all out, but he had a client call that he absolutely could not reschedule. Once it was over, however, he’d make a beeline home, and if she wanted to shout and scream at him, that was all right because he deserved it. He shrugged on his suit coat and then he was gone. When Myka heard the garage door open, she asked herself how stupid she had been not to realize when she pulled her car in next to his that he hadn’t finished his calls early and was waiting for her. He would never have done that, he would have simply gone back to the office. She had been so stupid for so long about him. Taking a suitcase from their closet, she had packed some of her clothes. She would stay at a motel until she could find a place to stay. She already had tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt, undergraduate, graduate (she had dropped out of the program midway through her dissertation), law school (she had completed one year). What was a motel bill on top of that? 

And what was a trip to a tropical resort on top of that? She had continued to work at the firm even after she and Sam had formally ended their engagement. She was the senior paralegal in the estate planning division; Sam was in mergers and acquisitions. They rarely had to cross paths, and when she did see him, she managed to keep her composure while it was Sam who reddened and sought to escape back to his office. The awkward solicitousness of the assistants and the other paralegals, even of the attorney she was assigned to, became harder to tolerate. She was all right, she didn’t need their concern. She didn’t have to be told that she was better off without him. But she had to concede, Sam had been right about one thing. She was drifting. She didn’t want to be a paralegal. She put in her two-week notice, and she let her sister Tracy talk her into the trip. Tracy had suggested that she go to Hawaii, that’s where she and Sam had planned to go on their honeymoon, and it would serve him right, Tracy had said, if Myka went by herself and found some gorgeous hunk of man to spend her days and nights with. Tracy even began to sound a little envious imagining it; she was five months pregnant with her second child, and while Kevin was a dear, dear man and the best husband she could ever have, he was also an accountant and that told you all you needed to know. Myka thought the honeymoon destination for just about any blushing bride between 18 and 80 wasn’t for her, but the tropics did sound appealing. She just wanted something off the beaten path. 

Well, she had gotten it. When she and Steve returned to the camp, they still had the bucket of water but no weaselings. Pete was sharpening another spear by the fire -- he had splintered two in the past few days -- and said sarcastically to Helena, who was patiently picking apart an especially fibrous vine, “I think that’s your call, Xena, to go take down some raccoons.” 

“Perhaps if Myka would check the snares earlier in the day, we wouldn’t be having this problem.” Helena wasn’t looking at her, focused on extracting the inner fibers from the vine. 

“Perhaps if you’d actually help out a little more around here, I wouldn’t be checking the snares in the middle of the afternoon.” Myka looked at her steadily. 

“I do help around here,” Helena said. “I bait the traps for the weaselings, I kill the raccoons, I port water and help dig latrines. I found the mint that we all chew and, currently, I’m hoping that we can use this fiber.” She tore off a length and wound it around her index fingers. “As dental floss. I, for one, am tired of sharing a ratty toothbrush. What I don’t do,” she said underscoring her words, “is traipse up and down that hill signaling to nonexistent planes. That is a waste of time.” 

“To you, maybe. Not to me,” Myka said quietly. She turned her back on Helena before she said something she would regret, although she wasn’t quite sure what that would be. Nothing she said, pleasant or unpleasant, ever seemed to evoke more than that black, flat-eyed stare. 

She stepped into their shelter and pulled out the remnants of Claudia’s backpack. Their dwindling supplies were kept in it. She didn’t remember much about the storm or what followed it. It sometimes seemed to her that she had stepped onto Artie’s boat, Pete holding out his hand to her to help her down onto the deck, only to step into the sand of this beach. There had been the towering clouds, the wind, the boat rocketing up the waves and then down, Artie yelling at all of them to tie themselves to the railing and then, later, yelling at them to untie themselves as Pete inflated the life raft and steadied it against the sinking boat. He had strapped to himself every knife he could find, and Myka had been terrified that one of them would inadvertently puncture the raft, but miraculously that hadn’t happened. He had thrown a hastily tied bedroll at her, consisting of blankets and extra clothes, toothpaste and a toothbrush, and a few buckets, and then he had been helping Helena down and Claudia and Steve, winning the argument with Artie that they should keep the backpacks, even though they would add to the weight in the raft. Then he had carried Artie down, which had nearly overturned the raft, because Artie was yelling and beating at Pete with his fists, crying that he should go down with his ship because it was his fault. There were oars fastened to the sides of the raft, and Pete had given one to Steve, and they had started paddling, and Artie had ducked his head down not looking at anyone, while Myka had watched the boat slowly upend -- like the Titanic had in the movie -- into a sea so calm that it almost seemed that the boat had chosen, now that they were all off of it, to dive into the water, as if it wanted to investigate what could have caused the waves to wrench it apart. 

Myka opened the backpack and itemized the remaining contents for the others. Two men’s t-shirts, one woman’s tank top, two sports bras, two pairs of shorts, one safety razor, the travel bottle of aspirin with eight aspirin left, one pair of scissors, a waterproof container holding matches, and one corroded iPad. She didn’t know why they kept the iPad except for the fact that Claudia wouldn’t let them throw it away. Looking down at her faded pink tank top with the holes along its seams, she announced that she was taking the remaining tank top for herself. Claudia and Helena shrugged. Myka knew that Claudia had squirreled away two t-shirts for herself, but she wasn’t going to call her on it. It wasn’t as grave a sin as sneaking food. As for Helena, she seemed content with the turquoise sports bra, and, strangely, it did seem to be holding up well, although her capris were another matter. They were in shreds, and the waistband hung so loosely around Helena’s hips that sometimes the pants rode down far enough that Myka could make out, as her eyes traveled the flat plane of Helena’s abdomen, the shadow of her pubic hair. Even recalling it made Myka blush. Why did she care what Helena inadvertently displayed if Helena didn’t? Certainly none of the men cared, not even Pete. 

She put the backpack in the shelter. Her talk with Steve had given her an idea. “After dinner tonight, let’s play a game of charades or something.” 

They all turned to stare at her. “Look,” she explained, “we’re all each of us has, and if we’re going to be stuck here for a while longer.” She couldn’t, wouldn’t allow herself to say ‘forever.’ “Then we need to develop a little. . . camaraderie.” 

“Aren’t we together enough as it is?” Artie growled. 

“But it’s all about getting through the day, making sure we have enough to eat and drink. We need something more than that.” Having anticipated their resistance, she added slyly, “We can break up into teams and whichever team wins gets to choose what chore they don’t want to do the next day.” 

No one seemed enthusiastic about the idea, but no one was objecting either, and when they finished their dinner of fish and fruit, they quickly paired off, that is, Claudia and Steve and Artie and Pete did, leaving Myka and Helena to form the remaining team. It wasn’t so much a game of charades that developed as a game in which they guessed movie titles and characters, sometimes interspersing the names of a few actors. Each time Helena and Myka guessed an actor’s name correctly, Pete would innocently pose the question whether Helena knew him (or her), and after the first “Yes” or two, when Helena began to realize what Pete was really asking, her lips would thin into an angry line and she would refuse to answer. 

Seeing how frequently she grimaced, Pete laughed all the harder. “That face is telling me everything I want to know and more. So, you and Johnny Depp? That comes as no surprise. C’mon, fess up, we’re all friends here. Was he all Edward Scissorhands with you?” 

“Knock it off, Pete,” Myka said. “Move on to the next one.” 

He sighed. “All right, all right.” He got up and whispered the answer into Helena’s ear, although she was straining away from him as much as she could. She walked around to the opposite side of the fire from Myka. 

“Glenn Close,” she said, hands on hips. 

“You’re going to have to give me more than that,” Myka said. 

“Glenn Close and rabbits,” Helena said. “Surely that gives it away, Myka.” 

Glenn Close and rabbits, Glenn Close and rabbits. Everyone was looking at her expectantly, and she had no idea what the answer was. She felt it stirring somewhere deep in her brain, but it wasn’t surfacing. It had been a big movie, and Glenn Close had had permed hair that approached the wild state of Myka’s own hair after almost two months of maltreatment and neglect. Why the hell couldn’t she come up with the name of the movie? 

“Another clue?” She pleaded weakly. 

“Michael Douglas,” Helena said, exasperated. 

“ _Basic Instinct_?” She hazarded, although she knew it was wrong. 

“Brrrrnnnnt,” Pete shouted in imitation of a buzzer. Adopting the false hearty voice of a game show host, he said, “Claudia and Steve, the game is yours with a two month stay on a deserted island if you can give us the right answer.” 

“It’s _Fatal Attraction_ , dude,” Claudia said pityingly to Myka. “How could you miss that?” 

Myka shrugged and said more nonchalantly than she felt, “Hey, I was in preschool when that movie came out. I never said I was a movie buff.” 

Claudia and Steve chose not to tote water from the spring, so Helena and Myka made extra trips the following morning. Helena was angrily banging the bucket against her leg, just as she had been grinding her teeth especially loudly when they had gone to sleep the night before. 

“Just spit it out,” Myka said wearily. 

Flinging her arms out, bucket nearly flying off her fingers, Helena exclaimed, “Really, how could you have missed that one? People who have never seen it know about the rabbit scene. I’m not even an American, and I know about the film.” 

“We’ll challenge Claudia and Steve to a rematch,” Myka suggested. “It’s just a couple of extra trips to the spring, it’s not a big deal.” 

“You can challenge them. I’m not teaming up with you again,” Helena said rudely. 

Myka stopped, and Helena walked on for a few paces before she realized that Myka hadn’t moved. “No one else will be your partner, you know that,” Myka said evenly. 

“I don’t care. I’ll play solo, which is probably what you wanted anyway,” Helena sniffed. 

“Are you accusing me of throwing the game simply because I didn’t want to play with you?” Myka asked incredulously. As Helena glared at her in resentful confirmation, Myka slowly wagged her head from left to right and back again. “You are a piece of work, you know that? You are selfish and thoughtless and just plain nasty. Why that director wanted to sleep with you, let alone his wife, is beyond me.” 

“Ah, now we come to it,” Helena said triumphantly. “Your little Midwestern soul just shrivels in revulsion at the fact that you have to share a shelter with a so-called sexual deviant, doesn’t it? I’ve always sensed a. . . distaste from you that my behavior never seemed to justify.” 

“First of all, I’m from Colorado,” Myka said hotly. “Secondly, I don’t care what gender you prefer, if you prefer one. What I don’t like about you is that you slept with a married man _and_ his wife. As someone who’s been cheated on, I can say there’s nothing that justifies betraying another person’s trust.” 

She half-expected Helena to laugh. Her outcry sounded old-fashioned, ludicrously old-fashioned, even to her. But Helena wasn’t laughing and she wasn’t sneering and she wasn’t turning away from her in scorn. Instead, she was looking at Myka sympathetically. She dropped her bucket and plopped down in the grass. “Your boyfriend? Husband?” 

“Sam was my fiancé,” Myka mumbled, folding her legs under her and joining her in the grass. 

“I don’t make a habit of sleeping with married people, and despite what Pete wanted everyone to think, I don’t sleep with that many people, period.” Helena inclined her head toward the sun, laughing to herself. “If you had seen me when I was 17, 18, 19 years old, you wouldn’t think I would stir anyone to the heights of passion, and maybe I don’t even now.” Her laugh became ironic. “I was bright but a frump, until I met one of my brother’s friends, who fancied himself something of a talent scout. I was too short to be a model, he said, at least a sought-after one, but there was something ‘arresting’ about my face. I had a bit of a crush on him, although I had a much more serious infatuation later on with his sister, but that’s another story for another time.” Helena gave her a roguish look that Myka didn’t want to find charming but did in spite of herself. “I wanted to impress him, so I took his advice.” She paused, an expression simultaneously shy and sad crossing her face. “I’m still that awkward girl in many respects, and she can let her head get turned. I met Nate when he was directing a film of one of my books, and he stormed the gates, so to speak. And then I met his wife, and I got a little starry-eyed. There were rumors that they did this, the two of them, sleep with one another’s paramours. No harm, no foul, right? But something went wrong, and the next thing I knew I was in the middle of their very public splitting up.” 

“Do you love him? Her? Both of them? Myka tried to keep a smile from her face but couldn’t. . . quite. 

Helena smiled sheepishly. “It does sound overmuch, doesn’t it?” She hesitated. “Nate’s very powerful, very important, within the confines of the industry, anyway, and it was hard not to respond to that. As for Andrea, she’s very dramatic, very, um, expressive.” Helena arched her eyebrows. “Fascinated with both of them, yes. In love, I don’t think so.” She pushed herself up and picked up her bucket. “We ought to get on to the spring, don’t you think?” 

Myka walked beside her. “What made you get on Artie’s boat?” 

Helena started laughing again, ruefully. “My personal assistant booked me a stay at what she promised was one of the most secluded resorts in the world. The plan was that I would stay there until the furor died down, and the plan was working, but then someone spotted me and told someone who told someone who spread it all over the internet, and even the maids were taking surreptitious photos of me and selling them. Who the hell was going to follow me onto Artie’s rusty old scow?” She began swinging her bucket again, but more gently. “I imagine Nate and Andrea have reconciled. I sometimes suspected this was all just a way to reenergize their marriage.” 

“I’m not in favor of relationships where you hurt each other to jolt things back to life,” Myka said. “If you care for the other person, I mean really care, you shouldn’t have to jump start your relationship. That says to me there wasn’t really anything there to begin with.” 

Helena lifted her shoulder dismissively. “I can’t say what works or doesn’t work for other people. I’m not even sure what works for me. I’m 35 years old, and the longest relationship I’ve had was a two-year marriage several years ago.” 

“How did that end?” Myka was surprised at how grim she sounded, as though it mattered to her, in some way, what Helena’s response was. 

“Not how you think,” Helena said chidingly. “I was an actress, or trying to be an actress at the time, and he was an actor, and we simply never saw each other. Out of 24 months, we were probably together for a total of four of them. There was no cheating, just a lack of interest after a while. It’s one of the reasons I got out of the business, I wanted to have the time to devote to a relationship. That, and I didn’t have the fire it takes to make a success out of acting. But I guess the right relationship hasn’t materialized yet.” 

“Good luck finding one here,” Myka laughed. 

“The pool’s small, admittedly, but I wouldn’t say the situation’s completely hopeless,” Helena said serenely. 

“I think if you can assure Pete that Little Pete wouldn’t end up even. . . littler.” Myka frowned at the word, but her eyes were shining mischievously. “You might have something there.” 

Helena only smiled.


	3. Chapter 3

_Tweive Weeks_  

The conversation with Helena didn’t make them fast friends, but Myka felt that it made their interactions easier. Mostly. Helena could still be impatient and even rude, but Myka generally ignored it unless her remarks grew too cutting, and then she would intervene. The most frequent objects of Helena’s wrath were Pete and Artie, although she no longer threatened to sue Artie, perhaps because almost no one believed after more than two and a half months on the island that they would ever be rescued. Except for Myka. Every afternoon she was on the hill with her mirror, rain or shine. Sometimes Helena would accompany her, hefting a spear or club, ready to slaughter any raccoon in their path, but the raccoons were getting wiser, shrieking and herding each other deeper into the rainforest when they saw a human approach. 

Helena would start to chase them, but Myka more frequently found herself pulling her back, her heart beating unaccountably hard. “What do you think is going to happen?” Helena demanded. “That they’re going to attack me en masse?” 

“They’re not your average raccoon,” Myka stubbornly maintained. “They’re not more scared of you than you are of them. They’re smart and they’re mean.” 

“So am I,” Helena said, but she would turn back and follow Myka out of the rainforest. “I hate fish,” she whined. 

They all hated fish by now, fish and crabs and bananas and turtle eggs, but they ate them. In the evenings, they would sit around the fire and talk quietly or play games. One night they asked each other which figures from history they would invite to dinner. Claudia nearly launched herself from the sand in her eagerness to go first. “Believe it or not, I’ve thought a lot about this, and my three are Nostradamus, H.P. Lovecraft, and Rasputin.” 

“Interesting choices,” Artie said. “Might want to have a food taster at the table, though.” 

“I know, that’s what I think is cool about it. There’s a hint of danger to it.” 

“Hint of craziness,” Pete muttered. 

Claudia stuck out her tongue at him. “So who are your three?” 

“Vince Lombardi, John Wayne, and LeBron James.” 

“Bo-o-o-o-ring.” Claudia opened her mouth in an exaggerated yawn. “Besides, how does LeBron James qualify as a historical figure?” 

“How can you say that? He’s one of the greatest basketball players ever. He’s history in the making,” Pete protested. 

“How about you, Steve?” Myka interjected. 

“Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Paul Allen,” he said promptly. ‘Regarding Gates and Allen, I offer the same argument as Pete. The history of the personal computer isn’t the same without them, doesn’t exist without them.” He turned toward Helena. “Who are your three, princess?” 

“Just two, I think,” Helena drawled. She had been looking into the fire, but she raised her head, and her dark eyes seemed to be glowing with its flames. “Warren and Jeannie Bering.” 

“Ooooh, Mykes, you rate,” Pete sniggered. 

“I don’t think my parents qualify as history-making figures in any sense of the term,” Myka demurred, glad that she could blame the heat of the fire for the heat she felt in her cheeks. 

“In your history they do,” Helena countered softly. 

The others shifted uncomfortably, but Myka couldn’t drop her eyes from Helena’s; she wasn’t sure, deep down, that she wanted to. Then Pete began to sing-song, “Myka and the princess up in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g. First comes love, then comes --” 

“Stop it right now.” it was Artie’s voice, sharp and authoritative in a way that Myka hadn’t heard since the night of the storm. Pete snapped his head up and looked at Artie quizzically. He held out his hands, palms up, but didn’t say anything more. 

“Thank you, Arthur.” It was the first time that Myka had ever heard Helena speak gratefully to him. “Myka has been the one person here who has always looked after me, no matter how badly I’ve behaved. She’s cared about my well being when she’s had no cause to do so. She’s treated me fairly and decently although I suspect that I’m not her favorite person.” Helena smiled at the understatement. “Why wouldn’t I want to meet the two people who brought her into this world?” 

“It’s going to be hard to top that, Artie,” Steve said lightly. 

Grunting as he used Steve’s shoulder to push himself up, Artie adjusted his spectacles. “I’m not even going to try. Goodnight, everyone.” 

“Night,” they chorused. From beneath brows corrugating in embarrassment, Pete looked first at Helena and then longer at Myka. “Sorry,” he mumbled. 

“Hey,” Claudia said brightly, “so what are we going to eat at this dinner? I want pizza at mine. Deep dish, sausage --” 

“Pepperoni,” Pete cut in dreamily, “Black olives, onions, tons of cheese. . . .” 

It went on like that for a long time, but Myka hardly paid attention. Helena had gotten up and walked away, not toward their shelter or the latrine but out, toward the center of the island. Myka wasn’t sure whether she ought to have followed; if Helena had wanted her to join her, she would have made the invitation clear. So she stayed where she was, half-listening to the others as they ravenously fantasized about the dinners they would have with their guests. As the fire burned down, Myka carefully fed it wood until the flames were steady, and then she went to the shelter and laid down on her pallet. She fell asleep to the sounds of Steve and Claudia and Pete adding course upon course to their meals. She didn’t wake again until Helena was crawling over her to her pallet, trying her best not to jostle her. 

“It’s not true,” Myka murmured, “that I don’t like you. I’m beginning to come around.” She heard Helena settle on her pallet and issue something that sounded like a smothered laugh. 

“As I said earlier, I’ve not given you much cause.” She was silent for so long that Myka thought she might have fallen asleep. “You never got a chance to tell us whom you’d invite to dinner.” 

“I haven’t been able to settle on just three. If we were waiting on me, we’d still be out by the fire.” Not certain why she was volunteering the information, particularly since Helena hadn’t raised the subject of Sam with her since their talk on the way to the spring, Myka said, “It was one of the excuses Sam gave for cheating on me, that I was indecisive, that I needed to be more take charge.” 

Helena’s laugh wasn’t smothered this time; it rang loud and amused in the shelter and beyond it as well, Myka was sure. “He should see you now.” 

The next couple of days, their 66th and 67th on the island, were unremarkable except for the fact that they were the last days that Myka would scratch into her calendar tree. She never knew what caused her sickness, whether she had eaten something the others hadn’t or whether some insect carrying an exotic microbe had bitten her, but after dinner on their 68th day, she had started feeling light-headed and, begging off “karaoke night” as Claudia called it, although, of course, they had no karaoke machine but only Pete playing riffs on air guitar, she had gone into the shelter to lie down. Kneeling and smoothing out her tattered piece of blanket was the last thing she remembered for the next several days. There had been fever and aches and chills, with fluids coming out of every orifice, or so it seemed. She had heard Pete saying, half in fear, half in awe, “Do you think she has Ebola?” And Helena responding, scathingly, “We’re on a godforsaken Pacific island, not in Africa, you idiot.” Myka wanted to laugh, but it would have taken too much effort, and it was easier to slip back into the twilight between wakefulness and fever dreams that she inhabited. There were other voices at other times, Artie’s, Steve’s, Claudia’s, but the only voice constantly with her, at times admonishing her, at times coaxing her, was Helena’s. When chills had her shaking so hard that her teeth chattered, it was Helena who held her still, and when fever had her muttering broken phrases to the gray, human-like shapes that passed behind her eyelids, it was Helena who said briskly, “Don’t listen to Sam, darling, he’s an even bigger idiot than Pete.” 

And it was Helena who gently but implacably forced her to eat once her illness had passed, skipping over the fish, bananas, and mangoes that nearly had Myka retching all over again for the newest addition to their menu, a thick, dun-colored paste that resembled poi. It didn’t matter how frequently Myka pushed away the half-gourd that served as a bowl, Helena wouldn’t leave until she had eaten the paste. 

Myka was keenly aware that there was no aspect of her care that Helena hadn’t undertaken. She had fed her, bathed her, changed her bedding as much as she could. There wasn’t an inch of Myka’s body that Helena hadn’t seen or washed clean. Myka didn’t feel embarrassed -- she had been sick, after all -- so much as she felt strangely disappointed, as if she had held the thought somehow that there might be an occasion when she would want to display herself to Helena, and now stamped forever in Helena’s mind would be Myka’s uncontrollably excreting body. 

Claudia had moved out of the shelter while Myka was sick, but she didn’t return once Myka was better, staying with Steve in a new shelter they had built. When she was steady enough on her feet that she could walk around the camp, Myka visited Claudia, carefully lowering herself to the sand, already winded from moving from shelter to fire to shelter. “You can come back, you know. Helena’s cleaned everything up.” 

A travel sewing kit next to her on the pallet, Claudia was trying to sew closed an open seam on a pair of shorts. “That’s not why I left, Myka. You didn’t gross me out, not permanently, anyway.” Flashing a sly smile at her before turning her attention back to her sewing, Claudia said, “I could read the handwriting on the bamboo. It was going to get crowded in there.” 

“It’s always been crowded in there.” 

“More crowded then,” Claudia said. “Artie’s snoring was driving Steve crazy, so our setting up our own shelter seemed to make sense.” 

“If you change your mind,” Myka said, “you can always move back in with us.” 

Claudia shook her head. “I’m thinking Helena wouldn’t be all that appreciative.” 

“She can’t have the shelter to herself.” 

Claudia put down the shorts and looked steadily at Myka. “You do know what I’m talking about, don’t you?” 

Myka’s heart began to beat faster, and she knew that a blush was beating into her cheeks, but she wouldn’t acknowledge what Claudia was suggesting. “I think we’re talking about you moving back into the shelter with us whenever you want to.” 

It was natural that a certain intimacy would develop between people when they had to care for each other, but it was also natural that the intimacy would wane, Myka reasoned. She was getting better every day, and Helena no longer watched her as closely as she did, returning to her habit of wandering the island or sitting on the rocks and looking out at the ocean. In fact, Helena’s taking care of her was of a piece with her solitary ramblings and her risking being swept into the sea. She had had no way of knowing that Myka hadn’t been sick with some contagious disease. Acting as Florence Nightingale had been selfless in the best sense but selfless in a recklessly indifferent way, too. 

“Why were you the one who nursed me?” It was late, and they were lying on their respective pallets in the shelter. Myka knew that Helena wasn’t asleep. She had been having a hard time going to sleep herself. Perhaps she had slept too much when she was recovering, although that didn’t make sense. Sleeping, a lot, was usually a part of recovering. 

“Did I perform that inadequately?” Helena dryly asked. “Or are you asking because it seemed out of character?” Her tone became even drier, if possible. 

“I could have had some Ebola-like virus. You didn’t know.” 

“If you had, staying outside the shelter wasn’t going to save me.” She added, “It seemed logical that Claudia or I should take care of you. Would you have been more comfortable with Pete?” Taking Myka’s silence as a concession, Helena said, “And you saw how Claudia was when Steve was hurt. Sadly, I was your best option.” 

“You were a very good nurse. The next time I’m stuck on a deserted island and puking my guts out, I’ll make sure to give you a call.” Myka wanted to thank her sincerely but couldn’t get the words right. 

“Just following my mother’s precepts. Treat an illness like you would a relative who’s overstayed his welcome, don’t overreact but make sure he leaves.” Myka heard the crunch of sand shifting, being displaced as Helena turned on her side. “You’re indispensable, Myka. Any one of the rest of us could go and we’d soldier on, but if we lost you. . . you’re the glue that holds us together.” 

“I doubt that,” Myka said automatically. because she knew she wasn’t essential or important, the graduate program hadn’t missed her when she left or law school or Sam, really. Within a month of her moving out and finding an apartment, he was seeing Karla again. She hadn’t had to learn that from the firm’s gossip mill; she had seen them after work, his arm draped across Karla’s back in the same casually possessive way he had hugged her to him when they were together. Preferring to turn the focus away from her, Myka said, “That still doesn’t explain why you go off wandering the island by yourself at night or stay out on the rocks and dare the waves to sweep you off. We couldn’t help you, Helena, if something like that happened.” The intensity with which she finished surprised her, and, embarrassed, she waited for Helena’s curt dismissal of her concern.

Instead she felt a hand touch her cheek and a thumb brush her lips, and she felt an almost overwhelming desire to draw that thumb into her mouth. But the thumb fell away as did Helena’s hand, and when Helena spoke, the matter-of-factness seemed completely at variance with the tenderness of her caress. “It’s not a death wish, if that’s what you’re thinking. It’s just. . . I keep thinking that this might be it, this island, and what have I left behind that’s worth remembering? No partner of any kind, no children, no body of work, no significant achievement. I suppose my triangle with Nate and his wife might have a half-life in some obscure corner of the Internet. I left school because modeling seemed easier and more fun, I slid into acting because I could make more money screaming my head off in a horror movie. I stopped acting because to get better roles meant I would have had to start working at it, and despite some measure of success as a writer, I haven’t written anything in over a year. And when I was writing. . . . “ She blew out a stream of air. “I hate the detective I created for my thrillers, a smug know-it-all.” She paused. “Don’t say what you’re thinking,’ she warned. 

“That you modeled him on someone you knew,” Myka said impishly as Helena gave her hip a shove. 

Helena’s hand lingered on the curve of Myka’s hip, and her voice strove for a nonchalance it didn’t quite attain. “If we never leave this island, what are your regrets? And if you say one of them is Sam, I won’t nurse you back to health the next time you’re sick.” 

“No, not Sam,” Myka said, distracted by Helena’s hand. She didn’t know what she wanted the hand to do, except for it not to remain where it was. She thought she might break into welts or hives her skin was so sensitive. Helena’s hand needed to go somewhere, away or down, and Myka was paralyzed by the realization that she wanted it to trail down her hip and across her abdomen as much as she wanted it to go away. Maybe during a college party she had made out with a girl -- she couldn’t remember the details well enough to know for sure -- but that had been it when it came to women. Otherwise there had been Cliff for a month or two in graduate school, Ryan for an abortive groping session one night during law school, and then Sam. That was the sum total of her romantic -- and sexual -- life. To think that Sam might be the pinnacle, it was enough to drive her out onto the rocks. “Yes, Sam,” Myka said, reversing herself and then rapidly, because she thought Helena made a dismayed noise, she added, “because he would be it, the best that I managed to do, and that would be sad. I can’t tell you now why I was engaged to him, except that my parents liked him, and I wanted the feeling of having made a good choice for once.” 

“Sam wasn’t a choice,” Helena said. “Making a choice is about acting on what you want, not what someone else wants.” 

The hand, almost imperceptibly, was moving, not away or down, but back and forth, as if Helena was waiting for her to decide, give the go-ahead. “Wanting, that’s been the difficult thing for me,” Myka admitted quietly. “Oughts and shoulds, those have always been easier.” 

Helena’s hand hovered just above her skin, and then it was gone, and there was the crunch of sand being displaced again as Helena turned away from her. “I hope someday that it will be different for you. Goodnight, Myka.” 

Their interactions went back to being, not difficult, but cool after that night. Helena was gone even more frequently, if possible, but she would return with weaselings and raccoons and bunches of the carrot-like root they, Artie actually, turned into paste. It was filling, if unappetizing. Helena sometimes participated in the games they played during the evening, but she would usually leave at some point and when she tiptoed into the shelter, much later, Myka would pretend she was asleep. It grew harder and harder to talk to Helena about anything other than the things that needed to be done that day or the next, and Myka began to miss the sarcastic, selfish Helena. The withdrawn woman who laid next to her every night, not sleeping as she wasn’t sleeping, was someone she didn’t know how to reach. 

She began to spend more time with Pete. She never felt the awkwardness with him that she did with Helena. He used a fishing pole of sorts now, rather than a spear, and they would stand on the ridge and talk, softly, he insisted, so as not to scare the fish, as he flung the line out again and again. The fibers Helena had so carefully worked to separate and remove from one of the species of vine that grew everywhere in the rainforest were a good substitute for fishing line, and Pete had cut and trimmed a branch to which he had tied a long length of the fiber; knotted at the other end of the line was a crude hook made from a needle. It wasn’t as good as fishing with a modern pole, he said, but it wasn’t bad. 

“What’s going on with you and the princess?” Pete was baiting his hook with something disgusting, bits of weaseling or raccoon, Myka suspected, but she didn’t want to look closely enough to verify. “You were all chummy and BFF, and now you’re hardly speaking to each other.” 

Myka shrugged. 

Pete snapped the pole behind him and then flicked the line in an arc as far over the waves as he could. “Be easier with a reel. Maybe Her Genius will put one together for me. You still get along well enough to ask her?” 

“I could try.” 

Pete gave her a shrewd look. “Maybe the problem’s that there isn’t anything going on between the two of you.” 

Myka flushed, although she said indignantly enough, “It’s nothing like that.” 

“Okay,” he said unconvinced, checking the tension of the line. 

“I’m a paralegal from Denver, who lives a completely ordinary life. Who had a completely ordinary fiancé, who was a man, by the way. I’m not the type of woman who gets involved with a supercilious British writer, a woman who has no problem, apparently, conducting her life online, who dismisses fidelity. . . .” Myka let her rant trail off, although the tone of aggrieved self-justification was clear as she said, more quietly, “I have nothing in common with her.” 

Pete mouthed “supercilious,” then wrinkled his face, as if he were going to spit it out. “I was a cop for a long time, thought I always would be. Wasn’t good at much else, you can ask my two ex-wives about that. But then something bad happened, really bad, and I wasn’t a cop anymore. I wandered for a long time and ended up working for Artie. Didn’t like the tropics, too hot, and didn’t know anything about boats. But if we get back, Artie’s going to retire and sell me his business, and I’m going to run guided tours in the south Pacific.” He started pulling the line in. “All I’m trying to say, Mykes, is that, I dunno, we’re bigger than the slots we put ourselves in.” 

“Thanks for the pep talk, but she’s the round hole, and I’m the square peg.” 

“I’m pretty sure she’d square her corners if you’d . . . “ He frowned, stymied at how to rephrase it. “Be a little more circular?” He examined his hook, shining, baitless, in the sun. “It sucks being stuck here. If there’s something that might make you happy, why deny yourself?” 

But denying yourself meant that you wanted whatever it was that you were refusing, and as she had tried to tell Helena, wanting wasn’t something she was used to. She was far more comfortable judging, appraising, evaluating. She was expert at conceiving a goal -- getting a Ph.D., passing the bar, marrying a wonderful man. They were goals that other people had for her as well. Her failure hadn’t been the goals themselves, but in the steps she had taken to achieve them. She should have realized that her dissertation topic was too complex, that she had entered law school too soon after dropping out of graduate school, that she hadn’t found in Sam the wonderful man she was going to marry. It wasn’t ‘what,’ she reassured herself, but ‘how.’ She needed better action plans, that was all. 

Which was why, as soon as she finished flashing distress signals for the afternoon, she was going to find Helena and they were going to sit down in their shelter and have things out. There was no reason that the two of them couldn’t get along. They might never be the best of friends, but they could be. . . collegial. Yes, collegial. She went through the sequence one more time and tucked the mirror into a pocket of her shorts. A burst of optimism about getting past the awkwardness with Helena lent her speed, and she took the descent faster than she normally did, skidding on loose rock and feeling the worn soles of the deck shoes she was wearing -- they were Steve’s and too big -- bend treacherously under her feet. She fell to her knees at the bottom, and she saw two brown legs and heard Helena say, amused, “I don’t require people to approach me on their hands and knees, but I don’t object either.” 

Myka wasn’t hurt, but she was embarrassed, and she wondered why she hadn’t seen Helena on the way down the hill. When had Helena gotten so stealthy? It was possible that she hadn’t seen her, Myka admitted, because she had been trying very hard of late not to. Because seeing her, really seeing her. . . . 

They were probably thousands of miles away from showers and hair care products and clothes that weren’t worn and actually fit them. They could count each other’s ribs, and their arms and legs were covered with scratches and bug bites. But Helena’s hair hung thick and straight, and it smelled of flowers. How did it not smell like her own, like wood smoke and sweat and fish? Myka had gotten to her feet, and without pausing to think or worry about it, she reached out and touched Helena’s hair, letting the strands slide over her fingers. Helena didn’t move away or ask her what she was doing; the dark eyes simply watched her, the face impassive. 

“I choose you. _I’m_ choosing,” Myka repeated, “and I choose you.” 

A smile began to tug at the corners of Helena’s lips, and she led Myka to the spring, where the grass was softer and the lush foliage of the rainforest was just beginning to overtake the terrain. Helena’s hand was on Myka’s hip as it had been that night, and Myka knew where she wanted it to go. It played with the waistband of Myka shorts and started picking slowly, ever so slowly, at the knots in the laces. Helena brought in her other hand to help as she leaned up and in, feathering Myka’s lips with kisses. 

“Hurry,” Myka murmured, trying to trap Helena’s lips between her teeth. 

“It took you this long to figure out what you want, and now I’m supposed to hurry?” But Helena was laughing. “We have all afternoon. We’re in paradise, remember?” 

Helena continued to laugh, but as Myka’s fingers teased her through the “new” sports bra Helena had acquired from Claudia, peach rather than turquoise, the laughter became softer, more broken, and finally Helena wound her hands in Myka’s hair and brought her head down, the kisses no longer featherlight but more demanding, more urgent, and Myka felt herself falling once more to her knees, thinking about Helena just as she had when she was skidding down the hill. But Helena was with her now, and Helena’s hands were no longer casually plucking at the laces of her shorts, but yanking them down over her hips, which took no more than a second because, like the shoes, they had been Steve’s too. She began pleading in the vicinity of Helena’s ear, sometimes her lips crushed against it, sometimes behind it, against Helena’s head, as her hips were too eager, she was too eager to settle into a rhythm, “I want, ah, Christ, Helena, I want.” Helena said nothing but began working down the length of her, and when her mouth settled where Myka thought she had never so intensely wanted a mouth to settle before, Myka mumbled, almost reproachfully, “No one told me. . I never knew that it could be so easy.” 

And later, much later, her head pillowed on Myka’s stomach, Helena said, “And if I had said that it was that easy, that all it would take was just a look or a touch -- if you were open to the possibility -- would you have believed me?” 

“Probably not,” Myka conceded. She was playing with Helena’s hair; if felt light and warm against her skin, like sand, but so much softer than sand, so much better than sand. Myka was tired of sand, but she didn’t think she would ever get tired of playing with Helena’s hair. “If it’s not hard, if it doesn’t require work, then it’s not worth having. That’s how I was brought up.” 

“Oh, I think you’ll find I’m work,” Helena promised, her voice low and indulgent. She turned her face into Myka’s abdomen, pressing her kisses deep and, then, raising her head, gently limning Myka’s belly button with her tongue. “You may have chosen me, but you have yet to take me.” 

“Really?” Myka teased. “I thought I had already done that, more than once.” 

“Just raising the bar for you, darling.” 

And as Myka sat up, looking into Helena’s expectant eyes, she began thinking about action plans, because wanting Helena wasn’t enough, having her was the goal.


	4. Chapter 4

_Twenty Weeks and. . ._  

Claudia was right, it would have been crowded in the shelter had she stayed. Sometimes there was barely enough room for her and Helena. Funny how what had been big enough for each of them individually became too small for them as a unit, a couple, whatever it was that they were together. They weren’t becoming one but three, their fledgling relationship something almost apart from them, having its own demands and needs. Such as a bigger shelter, so that when Helena pushed her down on her pallet and moved over her and when Myka, in turn, rolled Helena over onto her own pallet, they weren’t threatening to kick out one of the walls. And a shelter farther away from the others as well. Not very far but far enough that Myka didn’t feel that they were sharing in every one of her moans and cries. The first few days she had kept her eyes on her feet as she ventured out of their shelter of a morning, unable to meet the others’ knowing looks, but Helena hadn’t suffered from the same embarrassment, cheekily smiling as she sat with them, cutting slices from a mango with a pocket knife and popping them into her mouth, shamelessly batting back the cracks that Pete lobbed at them about “rocking the hut” or “knocking your coconuts together.” 

“Darling, you’re benefiting from a free education,” she would drawl. “I have the suspicion that you’ve always been something of a slow learner.” 

Myka would blush and mutter “Helena,” but it didn’t stop her, when Helena wore her ragged capris, which seemed to ride lower and lower on her hips, from pulling her into their shelter, or during the evenings as they all sat around the fire recounting the episodes of their favorite tv shows or playing a variant of Trivial Pursuit (but without the game board and the cards) from linking her arms around Helena’s waist and putting her lips to Helena’s shoulders, licking the salt that had dried from their afternoon swim in the bay. Though Helena would sometimes sit on the rocks by herself as she used to do or ramble the island alone, she did it less frequently. Observing how she reached for Myka’s hand in invitation to join her in one of her wanderings, Helena said in mock disgust, “I’ve put myself on a leash.” 

As they explored the island, or, rather, as Myka explored and Helena pointed out whatever intriguing features she had discovered on an earlier walk, the not entirely unwelcome thought crept into Myka’s mind that it wouldn’t be so horrible if they were never rescued. Not that it wouldn’t be horrible to live out the rest of her days without seeing her family and the baby that Tracy must have given birth to by now -- not to mention not ever having again books and coffee and salon conditioners -- but not as horrible as it would be otherwise. Helena made the difference; she was what made living on the island bearable and, as Helena stopped and slipped her hands under Myka’s tank top to cup first one breast and then the other, even enjoyable. As Helena backed her toward a depression in the grass, her eyes suddenly hot and intent, and as Myka let Helena claim her, loudly and possessively, because they could do this when they wanted, where they wanted, on the island, she thought she would forego flashing the distress signals today. She had better things to do. 

But high in the sky, beyond where Myka could see, a pilot must have registered . . . something during one of the afternoons she had held her mirror up to the sun until her arms ached. Maybe no more than an uneasy sense that there had been something different about the tiny island he routinely flew over on his patrols. He had let the unease work in him for awhile before he mentioned it to his superiors, and they had put it aside until one of them, the one who didn’t want to be the one pilloried, later, for not identifying a threat when it first emerged, brought it up again and suggested they divert one of their ships toward the island. Just for a few days, long enough to verify whether there was a concern. 

Myka and Helena were with the others in the camp. They had returned from the spring and, well, from doing other things, things that had resulted in grass getting in their hair and in what looked a lot like a hickey blossoming where Myka’s neck curved into her collarbone. Steve and Pete had gathered their spears and their fishing poles, but their eyes were on the palm that Steve had fallen from, and they were talking about ways of bringing it down and maybe fashioning a canoe from it. Helena joined them and then they were squatting in the sand, and Helena held a twig in her hand like she would a pencil and she was sketching some sort of schematic in the sand. From her seat in the shade of some young trees, Myka idly looked their way, her interest in what Steve and Pete had been discussing increasing only when Helena joined them. As she caught a view of Helena’s breasts, only partially held in by the peach spandex, her stomach lurched in a different way than it did when she was laying out fish or weaseling or raccoon on the cooking stones. She shouldn’t be like this, not all the time, anyway. They were basically living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle; there was no margin for her wanting to drag Helena back to their shelter. But somehow hunters and gatherers had managed to populate the globe, so maybe there was margin for what she wanted to do. . . now. 

She straightened and rose to her feet. Helena, who hadn’t failed to notice what Myka had been staring at, smiled broadly at her, and she tossed her twig on the sand. That was when Myka saw it, far out on the ocean, so far away that the ship looked as if it had been painted on the horizon. But the longer she watched, the less seamless horizon and ship seemed to be; there was a blue gap between the ship and the horizon, and it was growing. 

She mutely pointed. Then, because she wasn’t a hunter-gatherer from a hundred thousand years ago but a 30-year-old woman from Denver, Colorado, who had language skills and who was living like her ancient forbears only out of necessity, she said, “There’s a ship.” 

And then everyone saw it. In that moment, between the others’ silent wonder and the eruption of their yells and their frenzied rushing into the water as they jumped and down trying to capture the ship’s attention, Myka wished she had had the time to take Helena into the shelter, not for the hut-rocking sex she had wanted just a short time before, but to take that face into her hands and trace, with her eyes, each one of its features, the mouth that could be so sullen and yet so winning when it smiled, the brows that could angle down in discontent and arch in amusement, and then Helena’s eyes, so thickly lashed that Myka could only sigh in envy and so dark that she knew if she spent a lifetime looking into them she would never completely know what Helena was thinking. Because what they had had here wasn’t real, it was as unreal as the ship had first looked, a fling, a brief romance played out in front of a tropical island backdrop and just as two-dimensional. Then Claudia was wildly waving her arm at Myka to join them -- Helena was screaming and pogoing off the bay’s sandy bottom just like Steve and Artie and Pete -- and Myka ran into the waves, calling out to a ship that couldn’t possibly hear her. 

But the ship didn’t have to hear her or any of them, its mission was to anchor outside the bay and send a team in a small boat to investigate. Whether the fact that the potential threat was six hungry, bedraggled survivors of a once-in-a-millennium storm came as a relief or a disappointment to the pilot who had first sighted. . . something. . . Myka never knew. What she did know was that she had really, really missed hot showers and everyday food like sandwiches and cereal, although she couldn’t eat any of the latter, not right away. She almost cried when she saw the tweezers and nail clippers on the tiny vanity. 

They were quarantined on the ship. Just as a precaution, the doctor had told them. They were debriefed as well, which they were also told was just a precaution. “You know,” Helena said sarcastically, “because the storm might have been caused by terrorists.” Sitting together in the quarters they had been assigned next to the infirmary, Myka felt herself moving away from Helena, like those pieces of asteroids tumbling away from the spaceship in sci-fi flicks, although their knees were touching and Helena’s hand was half-covering her own. Even dressed in the drab, ill-fitting pants and shirts they had been given, Helena seemed more like the Helena Wells who hobnobbed with famous directors and actresses than she did the princess on the island. When she had pulled at her shirt, exclaiming in outrage that was mainly feigned, “They dressed us like maintenance workers!” Myka had known that Helena said it to make her laugh, but her laugh sounded thin. Yes, the hand pulling the shirt bore healed cuts and broken nails, but not for long. The cuts would disappear and the nails would grow, and that hand would be the manicured hand belonging to a model-turned-actress-turned-writer whom Myka had never known. 

When the ship entered the port of the island, the American protectorate, which had been the destination that she and Tracy had selected almost six months ago from a web site that sold tropical vacations, Myka didn’t recognize it. Which wasn’t that strange, she thought, since she had been on the island for only a few days before getting on Artie’s tour boat. But Artie and Pete had a similar, almost suspicious look on their faces, as if they weren’t quite sure this was really their home. The crowds gathered to welcome them seemed foreign, too, though the faces in the front looked familiar, her mom and dad, and the stylish older blonde who had to be Artie’s wife. There was a dark-haired man about Helena’s age who resembled her and who carried a little girl on his shoulders who looked so much like Helena’s description of her that Myka knew she had to be Christina, Helena’s niece. They were dear faces, and Myka knew that at some point she would be a sobbing mess giving hugs and kisses, but all she wanted to do right now was run back to her quarters, her and Helena’s quarters, and lock herself and Helena in them.   

But then they were among their families, and Myka was crying because she was glad to see her parents and the picture on her mother’s smart phone of her youngest nephew, named Michael. “After you,” her mother kept saying over and over, “because she thought you were dead. But a mother always knows better, hon.” She introduced her parents to Steve’s mother and Steve and Claudia, who had had no one to greet her but whom Steve’s mother had immediately adopted. Then there were Artie and Vanessa, and Artie was telling her father that she “kept us sane, kept us going,” and, of course, she would never leave without introducing her parents to Pete. He no longer looked like a pirate, wearing a gray short-sleeved shirt tucked into maintenance-worker-gray pants, his face clean-shaven. 

“I knew Mykes had to get her looks from someone,” Pete said admiringly as he pressed Jeannie Bering’s hand between his. Myka’s mother blushed, and Myka seeing it, realized where her blushes came from too. Her father merely beamed, soaking in his daughter’s sudden fame. 

“Have you taken them to meet the princess yet? Do they know about the princess?” He asked Myka in a loud aside meant to be overheard by her parents. He had the gleeful expression of a five-year-old saying a naughty word in public. 

“Princess? You were on the island with a princess?” Her mother asked, and Myka’s father visibly swelled with pride. His famous daughter was friends with a princess. 

“No, that’s just what we called her because --” Myka fumbled for an explanation. 

“She gave herself airs,” Pete cut in. “But she turned out not to be all that bad, and I guess you could call her a princess of the media.” He turned and pointed toward a group of reporters circling Helena and her family, cameras and microphones fluttering, hovering over them like birds. 

“Helena Wells,” Myka’s mother said in recognition. “We heard that she was on the tour boat with you.” Her tone was cool, showing none of the excitement just a few minutes ago when she thought Myka had shared a hut for five months with a princess. 

“Hope she’s better than her reputation,” Myka’s father said dourly. 

Don’t talk about my girlfriend like that. You have no idea what she’s like. I chose her. For the first time in my life, I truly wanted something. I still want her. But Myka said none of those things. She shifted her feet uncomfortably. “Let’s go to the hotel,” she suggested quietly. “I’ll introduce you to Helena and her family later, when things have calmed down.” 

As she and her parents passed by Helena, Helena launched herself against the ring of reporters, struggling through them and calling after Myka, “Myka, wait. Don’t go yet.” Impatiently she faced her interrogators. “I’ll give you all a 30-minute interview later, if you want, but for God’s sake, take pity on me and my family, and leave us alone.” 

The reporters only shrugged and continued pressing in, but the island police, having stood by and watched the circus, began approaching the reporters, threatening to arrest them for trespassing, for disturbing the peace, for any number of minor infractions. They reluctantly began to retreat and Helena grabbed at her parents’ hands, urging them toward Myka and her parents. Myka couldn’t help but grin when she shook hands with Helena’s mother, a tiny, bubbly woman who spoke with an accent that was broader than her daughter’s. She could imagine Emily and her mother having lunch and talking about their children. Helena’s father was quieter, more reserved, and she could see how Helena had transformed that reserve into hauteur, but he didn’t seem that different from other fathers, including her own. He worked as an analyst in a financial services firm, and Myka wouldn’t have been surprised if he had grumbled at his wife that the kids were disturbing his reading of the newspaper, just as her father had done when she and Tracy were small. All in all, Helena’s family wasn’t that different from her own -- even Charlie, Helena’s older brother, with his bald spot and his sloped shoulders and his tired indulgence of his daughter’s pleas to put her on his shoulders again was only another version of Myka’s brother-in-law Kevin. It wasn’t hard to believe, looking at them, that, 20 years ago, Helena had been a shy science nerd. But instead of finding it reassuring that Helena’s background was so familiar, Myka couldn’t shake her unease; the similarities only underscored how far Helena had traveled from what she was. 

Helena’s hand was on her shoulder and then Myka felt Helena’s arm circling her waist. Myka’s mother lifted an eyebrow, but Helena’s attention was on her parents. “Mum, Dad,” she said, and Myka thought she heard the faintest tremor in Helena’s voice. “I want you to know how important Myka is to me. I’m not sure I would have made it without her, and I’ve ---” 

Myka stepped out of the embrace, patting Helena’s upper arm like she might an elderly aunt’s. “Your daughter’s vastly exaggerating my importance. I was only doing what any friend would do, and we all became close friends in our time on the island.” 

Myka’s mother looked relieved, Helena’s parents glanced at each other in momentary confusion, and Helena was stunned. Her mouth dropped open and, for once, Myka could see in those eyes everything Helena was feeling, shock, disbelief, and a growing sense of betrayal. Then the actress that Helena had been took over, and hanging a smile on her face, she said to her parents, “As usual Myka’s being modest, because she doesn’t recognize the wealth of talents she has, but she was a truly wonderful friend to us all.” 

Myka shot a quick look at her mother, wondering if she had heard the slight, ironic emphasis Helena had given to the words “wealth of talents,” but her mother was only smiling, equally falsely, at Helena. Helena had taken her parents’ arms again, but this time she was urging them away from Myka. Exchanging another series of confused looks, Emily and her husband hastily shook Myka’s hand before Helena hustled them out of range. Trying not to show the misery she felt, Myka began leading her parents toward the hotel. “Is it too late to call Tracy, do you think?” 

That night and the next day they were feted by the island’s officials. There were interviews with reporters on the island and interviews with reporters online. Myka went through it all numbly. She wasn’t sure why she had put a stop to Helena’s declaration, except that she couldn’t have borne to hear whatever it was Helena had really meant to say. It wouldn’t have sounded right, here on _this_ island. She been with Helena at the group interviews, of course, which Helena had handled with far more aplomb than the rest of them, joking with the reporters and graciously expressing her admiration for her fellow castaways, while they, the five, could only mutter and look away from the cameras. They had had to share a table at the dinner held for them the next night. Myka had tried to squeeze herself and her parents at the table with Steve, his mom, and Claudia, but Pete made sure that he and his date, a pretty African-American nurse at Vanessa’s clinic, took two of the three chairs. 

“Oh, so sorry,” he said. “I guess you’ll have to sit with Helena and her folks.” Lowering his voice as he scooted Leena’s chair closer in to the table, he said, “I heard about what happened when you met her family yesterday. What’s going on with you, Mykes?” 

“Just reality,” she said wearily. 

Dinner wasn’t awkward for her parents or Helena’s. Emily and Jeannie chatted about their children, just as Myka had imagined they might, and while Myka hadn’t thought Helena’s father, Gerald, and her father would have anything in common, they discovered a mutual fondness for Monty Python that provided enough material for a conversation through dinner. Helena spent most of the dinner talking with Charlie and teasing Christina, speaking to Myka only when she had to ask Myka to pass the salt, and Myka spent the dinner wishing that she could be anywhere else. 

After dinner, there were speeches. Myka didn’t understand why there were speeches, except that they provided the officials an opportunity to preen in front of their constituents since the officials had very little to say about the Shipwrecked Six, as the media were calling the six of them now. The word “heroes” was mentioned several times, but Myka didn’t think that their survival itself was heroic. Perhaps if they had rescued someone on the island, that might have justified being called “heroic,” or if they had discovered some plant that cured cancer or Alzheimer’s. But they weren’t heroic, they were ordinary. She was ordinary, and why the hell didn’t Helena realize that already? 

Later that night, she left her room, her suite really, the hotel had put her and her family up in one of their grand suites, just as they had Steve and Claudia. Helena, of course, was staying at an even more exclusive resort farther up the island’s coast. She crossed the lane in front of the hotel, stopping on the curb to take off her shoes, and then she was running, lightly, to the beach. She found a place in the sand and hugged her knees to her, watching the dark restlessness of the ocean. If they had been on their island, she would already be in her shelter, listening to the ocean rather than watching it. But they weren’t on their island, and tomorrow she would be flying back to Colorado, which seemed like another country to her now. She supposed Helena would be flying back to London or maybe. . . where was it Helena had said she lived? As Myka searched her memory, she thought it telling that she wasn’t sure where the woman she had slept with for two months actually lived. San Francisco, that was it. Early on, when Helena had been at her most snobbish and offputting, she had said that living in Los Angeles would have put her closer to the industry but why live in a city that you could mistake for Phoenix or Atlanta? 

Helena had been breathtaking at the dinner tonight. Her dress had been an evening gown in a deep red that had complemented her island tan and the darkness of her hair. The plunging neckline of the gown had drawn Myka’s eyes to breasts that were finally freed of the (partial) constraint of Claudia’s sports bras. She looked like the Helena Wells in the pictures that Myka had brought up on her mother’s smart phone. Pictures in which, yes, she had been on Johnny Depp’s arm and, later, kissing the famous director. Just for comparison, Myka had hunted for a picture of her on the phone, and she found one from her and Sam’s engagement party. She had been wearing a green dress that had seemed expensive -- and nice -- to her at the time, though it was nothing next to Helena’s designer outfits. Sam was beside her, one arm around her shoulders and the other holding up a champagne glass. They looked happy enough, she guessed. She remembered that night, Sam had been expansive and a little drunk, and she had continually looked at the ring on her finger. It was too big, Sam hadn’t had it sized properly, and she had half-clenched her fingers all night for fear it might fall off. That should have been a sign. 

She sighed. If Helena remarried, she wouldn’t be holding an engagement party in a rented room at a bar and grill. When she had been looking up Helena on the Internet, she had come across an entertainment news item about Helena’s director and his wife. They had reconciled, Helena had been right about them. Looking down the beach, Myka could make out a figure at the water’s edge slowly walking her way. Even in the dark, she would recognize that swing to Helena’s walk. 

She had the thought that she might grab her shoes and start running back to her hotel, but she didn’t move, and eventually Helena turned away from the water and crossed the sand toward her. She sat down, but not close. The evening gown had been replaced by capris and a casual top, but Myka could still smell the perfume she had worn to the dinner. 

“I’m finding it hard to reacclimatize,” Helena said casually enough. “Too many people, too much noise. I shudder to think what it’ll be like returning to the States.” 

“It’s only been a couple of days,” Myka said, “you can’t expect to make the transition back so quickly.” 

“You seem to have done it easily enough.” Myka felt the acidic sting of Helena’s words. “I would have thought that you of all people would have had the grace to tell me why.” 

“Did you look at yourself tonight? Have you noticed the reporters following you like puppy dogs? This is who you are. You’re Helena Wells, you write books that are snapped up for movies, you stay in fancy resorts, you wear clothes that would cost me a year’s salary. Did you look at me tonight? Did you hear how that one official introduced me, ‘Myka Berryman, a librarian from Colorado?’”

“What does it matter what any of them think? I know you. You’re not some retiring office assistant any more than you were meant for that pompous attorney.” Helena swept her hand through her hair. “I looked him up. I searched for your law firm online, and I saw his picture. Nice looking enough if you don’t mind someone with jowls and a rapidly receding hairline by the time he’s 40. He’s the type of person, who, at a cocktail party, would constantly put down his wife while he’s trying to grab the ass of his subordinate’s wife. Don’t tell me you dumped me to go back to him.” 

“I didn’t dump you,” Myka protested. “I just needed time. We both need time. Here isn’t there, back on the island, you know.” 

“Here, there, it doesn’t matter,” Helena said with frustration. She gracelessly pushed herself up, stumbling a little, and Myka wondered just how much Helena had had to drink. “You chose me. You can’t just put me back on the shelf. It doesn’t work that way with people, not with me, anyway. You break me, you buy me.” She was turning away, already walking in the direction of her resort. “My family is flying back to England tomorrow, but I’m staying here for a while longer. You can always choose to stay and see what happens. It might turn out to be good, really good. Did you ever think of that?” 

Or it might turn out to be a disaster. Because we come from two different worlds, Myka silently shouted, that just happened to collide on the island. But Helena had already disappeared into the night. Myka picked up her shoes, not remembering to put them on until she was in the lobby of the hotel. Claudia was on a sofa, absorbed in tinkering with her iPad. Not her iPad, but Joshua’s. Steve had finally told her that, and it explained why Claudia had so doggedly held onto it. She had been trying to get it to work ever since they had been picked up by the ship. Myka was tempted to tell her to stop, that the computer was never going to work again no matter how much she labored over it. But as she looked at the complete absorption on Claudia’s face, she realized that Claudia already knew the computer was a lost cause. She didn’t expect it to work, but her efforts were a way to maintain a connection. Sometimes the goal was the action plan. Wanting something, working to keep it, maybe that would be all you would ever be granted. And if you gave up on that, the feeling that this was important, that this was what you wanted, needed above all else, and you let her go because you were afraid that what you could do wouldn’t be enough to keep her, then. . . . It was no different than being on the island and refusing to come out of your shelter because no matter what you did, you wouldn’t be rescued. She couldn’t be like that, she hadn’t been like that. She wasn’t like that. 

Her mother was still up when Myka entered the suite. “Were you with the princess?” She asked. There was resignation in her voice but a teasing note as well, as if she had already resolved that there were worse things that could happen to her daughter than falling for some spoiled celebrity. 

“Yes, I mean no, not the way you think.” Myka sank into a chair across from the sofa her mother was curled up on, robe belted snugly around her. 

“You were looking at her all evening, and she was pretending with all her might that she didn’t care you were there. She may be a pretty good actress, but I’m always on the lookout for how people act around my kids, if they know how lucky they are, if they’re smart enough to treat my girls right.” Jeannie smiled, a little sadly. “I wanted to like Sam, I did. But he’s not that bright, and he was always looking over you or around you or through you. Helena was looking at you like she wanted to devour you on the spot.” She sighed. “She’s going to a bit of a smartass, isn’t she? Emily warned me.” 

“I’m not going home with you tomorrow, Mom.” 

“I know that. That’s why I waited for you to come in. I wanted to have a little extra time with you now.” She got up and kissed Myka on her head. “I’ll give you a couple of weeks, but then you’re coming to Colorado for a visit, and she better be with you. If only for your father’s sake. I think he’s e-mailed all our friends back home that you’re friends with somebody famous.” She sighed again. “I’ll break it to him on the plane ride tomorrow that you’re more than friends. It’s going to be a very long flight.” 

Myka took the cab with them in the morning to the airport. She hugged her father tightly, but she hugged her mother especially fiercely. “Thank you,” she whispered. 

The cab ride seemed twice as long on the way back, and Myka considered having the driver take her to the resort where Helena was staying, but perhaps Helena was saying goodbye to her family as well. She didn’t want to interrupt it. There might be a time when she would be a part of those farewells -- no, there would be a time when she would be a part of those farewells, she corrected herself -- but it wasn’t today. So she had the driver take her back to the hotel, although she had already checked out. She lingered in the lobby, half-expecting to see Claudia still bent over the iPad and half-hoping that Helena would come through the entrance. And then the thought hit her, what if Helena had changed her mind? What if, after their talk on the beach last night, Helena had decided she wasn’t worth it, and she had decided to fly back to England with her family? What if. . . and the pictures of Nate the director and Andrea the actress flashed through her mind. 

Myka ran out the sliding doors, looking to flag one of the cabs that outnumbered the people on the island to take her to the resort, when she saw Helena sitting on a bench, looking very cool and very beautiful in a white dress with a halter top, her shoulders bare and brown. Myka remembered kissing those shoulders and licking the salt from their skin, and she wondered if she would always feel that ache when she thought about touching Helena. She hoped so. Helena was eating something, a flavored ice, and she smiled up at Myka, as Myka sat next to her.

“You know what I said about not sharing food,” Myka said reprovingly. 

“That the others wouldn’t share with me,” Helena said idly, crunching a few ice crystals. “Do you remember what I told you?”

“That I wouldn’t let you starve.” Myka leaned over and took a mouthful of the ice. Some berry flavor. She had been afraid it would taste like mango. “But you couldn’t have been sure.” 

“Oh, but I was. Because I had already chosen you.” Helena tilted her face toward the sun. “I chose well,” she said smugly. 

“You hadn’t chosen me then. You didn’t even like me back then,” Myka said. 

Helena opened one eye. “That’s what you think. Don’t forget, I am an actress.” 

Myka looked at her, suddenly unsure. Helena remained deadpan. The standoff didn’t last very long as they both began to smile. Leaning against the back of the bench, Myka thought she better not set it as a goal to fully understand the woman beside her, but she welcomed the challenge as something to add to her Helena action plan, which she already knew would take longer than a lifetime to complete.


End file.
